Enter the Fall Guy. The broken messiah crucified for his vision. Tended only by Gina Magdalene. The man who had tried to show us the light. Show us the way. Stuck in his own echo chamber of hallelujahs. Rejected and despised by his people. Yet who would one day be worshipped and adored for centuries to come. Yes, it turns out that the biggest victim of the pandemic was Matt Hancock himself. How could we have all been so slow to realise this?
Alas poor Door Matt. For the past few months, most of his former colleagues have been queueing up to dump on him from a great height. Led by Dominic Cummings. Who else? The man without a good word to say about anybody had given pages of evidence to the Covid inquiry, listing all the lies Matty had told during his stint as health secretary. Then the good-natured Helen MacNamara had also branded him a liar. Mark Sedwill had blamed him for thousands of deaths. Et tu, Patrick? Vallance had called him a fantasist. Truly there was no honour for this prophet in his own land.
But in the intervening months since being sacked as health secretary in the summer of 2021, Door Matt has not been idle. He has been nursing his stigmata. Determined to make a second coming. He has appeared on Celebrity SAS. Surviving untold hardships and cruelties. Being mocked by the drill sergeants. A turn on I’m a Celeb. A chance to show the world the real him. Shame the world did see the Real Matt. They just didn’t much like him.
Then he had written Pandemic Diaries. Or rather, Isabel Oakeshott had. Truly this would be the gospel for this millennium. Now he would be believed. He would return among his people to give them a final chance of redemption. Truly, he was the lord of forgiveness.
Now was his chance to give evidence to the Covid inquiry. Early morning found him unaccountably nervous. Even the Chosen One was allowed his doubts. Gina Magdalene gave him a hug. “Try not to look too needy,” she said. “Well, even needier than normal. The public hate that. But maybe a tear would be good. Though not of self-pity. And wear your famous lucky pink tie. You look so hot in that, babes.”
It turned out that the lead counsel, Hugo Keith, was on a mission to troll Hancock. Because he was wearing an almost identical pink tie. Door Matt tried not to let himself be distracted. Keep your eyes straight ahead, he told himself. Try not to talk too much. Just answer the questions. Don’t get rattled. Easier said than done. He had his pride. He wasn’t going to let the inquiry walk over him. This was his truth.
Keith eyed up Hancock. Let’s start with Pandemic Diaries. The elephant in the room. Best to get them out of the way. How could he put this delicately? They weren’t actually diaries, were they? They weren’t written contemporaneously. They were just scraps of messages, things that Door Matt would have liked to be true. Would it not be best to file them under fiction?
Absolutely not, insisted Hancock. Because they were imaginary, they were a better depiction of the truth than reality. A higher truth. Keith smirked. He would use the diaries against this witness time and time again. Like punching a bruise. Door Matt winced. Trying to rise above it. Levitation for beginners.
Moving on. There were no plans for the pandemic. Absolutely there were, said Hancock, chippily. He has perfected the art of being snitty. They just happened to be the wrong ones. The rest was of the life more martyred. He didn’t really know why everyone else had been so beastly about him. Considered him to be a delusional halfwit. But it must have been because they were jealous. Overawed by his brilliance. By his charm. By his charisma.
Even the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser had had to concede that their knowledge was eclipsed by his. At every turn, Door Matt’s only mistake had been to be consistently ahead of the curve. Most of all, everyone was devastated by his magnetic sexual attraction. They had all wanted to be the one doing the groping in the CCTV footage. But Gina had always only had eyes for him. And they just couldn’t live with that.
God knows, Hancock had tried to combat the toxic culture in government. But there were limits. Time and again he had begged Boris to take action. It had been he who had first spotted the danger of the coronavirus. Even before the first cases in China, he had been warning of the dangers of a pandemic. He had been desperate to lock down on 13 March.
“That’s odd,” said Keith. Because the fantastically accurate Pandemic Diaries gave no indication of you wanting an immediate lockdown. Door Matt became even more defensive. Well, he definitely had. So there. And if it wasn’t in the gospel according to Isabel, that was only because neither she nor he had yet remembered that was part of his imagination.
Matty slumped forward. He didn’t want to blame others for being less wonderful than him. That wouldn’t be fair. Not his style. He merely felt sorry for the inadequacies of others. If he had a fault, it was that he had worked too hard. Maybe he should have let others, such as Boris, do more. Even if it killed more people. Something he definitely hadn’t done.
And when he had said he had thrown a protective ring around care homes, what he had meant was that he had meant to do so. It was more or less in hand. This was a government that should be judged by intentions and not results. Which is why he had to admit that Rishi Sunak had definitely set out to kill people with his help out to wipe out scheme. But he had merely kept silent. Not to rock the boat.
That was it for the day. Door Matt rushed home. It was a Thursday night. All around him people would be opening their front doors to applaud him for everything he had done. Keith just stared at his heavily notated copy of Pandemic Diaries. Time he would never get back. But at least he could now get rid of it. Provided the Oxfam shop would take it. He doubted they wanted another copy.
John Crace’s book Depraved New World (Guardian Faber, £16.99) is out now. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy and save 18% at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
A year in Westminster: John Crace and Marina Hyde live in London and online. On Monday 11 December 8pm-9.30pm GMT, join John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar for a livestream discussion on another year of anarchy in British politics. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live
